Episode 19
Summary With Atera's barrier down, the Fire temple magicians try to speculate why Brilith's vigor is all used up. Since she is catatonic instead of sleeping, her vigor is not recovering, either. As they argue over Lorraine (their best backup) being sent away on business, Asha arrives and asks what happened to the priest. The magicians continue to argue as Asha recalls a past conversation with Brilith in which she said she wanted to remain being a priest in spite of the hardships. Asha then asks the magicians to take her to the barrier stone so she can restart the barrier, but they are reluctant to allow it since she does not have triple attributes. In the city, volunteers are handing out food and supplies when Kaz spots a large creature (Maruna) atop a nearby mountain. Haas has a bad feeling about it and decides to alert the crowd. Maruna begins to charge his trancendental skill to target the entire city. Asha continues to argue with the magicians, even as the sky above turns red. When the magicians realize that this is a true emergency, they finally relent. Leez blames herself for putting the city in danger because the red-white sura followed her there. The barrier stone appears to be active yet non-functioning. Leez offers to try to create a barrier since she has triple-kubera attributes, but instead, Asha throws her out and locks the door. Asha places her hand on the stone just as Maruna's transcendental activates. 1-19 Haas and Kaz.png|that cat 1-19 red sky.png|red sky 1-19 Asha with the barrier orb.png|barrier orb Currygom's comment She is a low-level, so she was forcibly expelled. Afterword ■ Asha and Brilith seem to have met before. In this episode, Asha referred to Brilith as Priest-''nim'' in front of the temple magicians out of respect, though she usually doesn't use ''-nim'' when speaking to Brilith. ■ The temple magicians are minor characters, but they've appeared more often than Leez's mother, hehehe. Even though they are side characters...they don't appear very often. How often a character appears and how important they are to the story are completely different. There are characters who are very important yet appear in only one scene, for example. All three of these characters were mentioned in Episode 9. They all attended Eloth University and are Asha's seniors. But Asha attended a long time after them, so the only one who knows much about her is the woman with curly hair. She looks much younger than the other two because she's a quarter (25% sura mixed-blood). ■ Vigor and birth attributes are briefly mentioned. More details will be given after all six elements needed for magic have been revealed in the story. Some readers tell me in private messages that I should tell them, via the blog, everything they're curious about (especially about birth attributes). There are more than 80 blog posts which will be officially released later. I'll make them public when it's the right time... I won't do it because you ask me to, hehe. When they're released, since they're not new posts (i.e. pre-written and set to private), they won't appear under Naver blogs' update notification. The main/side character profiles are already being updated on the blog this way. They were pre-written and are set to public now. ■ Kaz & Haas are finally back. It's been a while since we spotted them briefly in the crowd back in Episode 6. They seem like the type who could survive no matter what until the end, hehehe. Ah, Haas is drawn as a stick figure... It's a throwback (?) from the Best Challenge version. ■ We had our first glance of Maruna's sura form in Episode 4, where only his head was shown. There were slight changes from Best Challenge, especially to his beak and feet to make them look more bird-like. (In Best Challenge, it was hard to tell that he was a bird.) He also used to have arms, but they would interfere with flying so they were mostly hidden when he did. But I did draw his arms so that he would look properly drawn. I think his sura form looks cooler with arms, but... they make him more difficult to draw. Maruna is already the character that takes me the most time to draw. ■ The transcendental Maruna uses this episode is Crimson Blitz. Unlike the skills shown earlier, this one can't be used in human form; it can only be used in sura form. Maruna's transcendentals appear often so I think there will be a post about them soon. ■ MC_tossed_from_the_party.jpg Notes * The series later reveals under what circumstances Asha failed to obtain an AA rank. * We saw Kaz, Haas and the pouting cat in Atera earlier. Show/Hide Spoiler The cat was actually meant to be a birthday present for Leez. * Currygom mentions in a later afterword that the barrier stone is glowing yellow here because it is overheated. Normally it is reddish orange. References